You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
The Barbarians Speak re-creates the story of Europe's indigenous people who were nearly stricken from historical memory even as they adopted and transformed aspects of Roman culture. The Celts and Germans inhabiting temperate Europe before the arrival of the Romans left no written record of their lives and were often dismissed as "barbarians" by the Romans who conquered them. Accounts by Julius Caesar and a handful of other Roman and Greek writers would lead us to think that prior to contact with the Romans, European natives had much simpler political systems, smaller settlements, no evolving social identities, and that they practiced human sacrifice. A more accurate, sophisticated picture o...
The Archaeology of Colonialism demonstrates how artifacts are not only the residue of social interaction but also instrumental in shaping identities and communities. Claire Lyons and John Papadopoulos summarize the complex issues addressed by this collection of essays. Four case studies illustrate the use of archaeological artifacts to reconstruct social structures. They include ceramic objects from Mesopotamian colonists in fourth-millennium Anatolia; the Greek influence on early Iberian sculpture and language; the influence of architecture on the West African coast; and settlements across Punic Sardinia that indicate the blending of cultures. The remaining essays look at the roles myth, ritual, and religion played in forming colonial identities. In particular, they discuss the cultural middle ground established among Greeks and Etruscans; clothing as an instrument of European colonialism in nineteenth-century Oceania; sixteenth-century Andean urban planning and kinship relations; and the Dutch East India Company settlement at the Cape of Good Hope.
Andre Tchernia is one of the leading experts on amphorae as a source of economic history, a pioneer of maritime archaeology, and author of a wealth of articles on Roman trade, notably the wine trade. This book brings together the author's previously published essays, updated and revised, with recent notes and prefaced with an entirely new synthesis of his views on Roman commerce with a particular emphasis on the people involved in it. The book is divided into two main parts. The first is a general study of the structure of Roman trade: landowners and traders, traders' fortunes, the matter of the market, the role of the state, and dispatching what is required. It tackles the recent debates on...
Recent advances in research show that the distinctive features of high medieval civilization began developing centuries earlier than previously thought. The era once dismissed as a "Dark Age" now turns out to have been the long morning of the medieval millennium: the centuries from AD 500 to 1000 witnessed the dawn of developments that were to shape Europe for centuries to come. In 2004, historians, art historians, archaeologists, and literary specialists from Europe and North America convened at Harvard University for an interdisciplinary conference exploring new directions in the study of that long morning of medieval Europe, the early Middle Ages. Invited to think about what seemed to eac...
Build Your Own Magical Practice Rooted in Celtic Traditions Shaped by ancient and mythological texts, this book introduces you to a wellspring of Celtic magic and demonstrates how to apply these deep traditions to your unique, contemporary practice. Morpheus Ravenna helps you develop your skills from the ground up through rituals and deity work for healing, empowerment, justice, and more. With hands-on activities woven alongside history and lore from all over the Celtic world, you will master spiritual hygiene practices, protection methods, conflict magic, and a variety of other topics. Drawing upon polytheism, animism, and a connection to the Otherworld, Morpheus provides instructions for blessing water, conducting an ancestor elevation rite, beginning a spirit alliance, and creating a curse tablet. You will advance your sorcery through divination, sigil work, necromancy, and other techniques, developing more powerful expertise every step of the way. Includes a foreword by River Devora, a multi-traditional spirit worker, healer, clergyperson, and teacher
In this work of sweeping erudition, one of our foremost historians of early Christianity considers a variety of theoretical critiques to examine the problems and opportunities posed by the ways in which history is written. Elizabeth Clark argues forcefully for a renewal of the study of premodern Western history through engagement with the kinds of critical methods that have transformed other humanities disciplines in recent decades. History, Theory, Text provides a user-friendly survey of crucial developments in nineteenth- and twentieth-century debates surrounding history, philosophy, and critical theory. Beginning with the "noble dream" of "history as it really was" in the works of Leopold...
This treatise posits that Druidism and Christianity were established by sun-worshipping Punic colonizers of Europe.
The Edges of the Roman World is a volume consisting of seventeen papers dealing with different approaches to cultural changes that occurred in the context of Roman imperial politics. Papers are mainly focused on societies on the fringes, both social and geographical, and their response to Roman Imperialism. This volume is not a textbook, but rather a collection of different approaches which address the same problem of Roman Imperialism in local contexts. The volume is greatly inspired by the first “Imperialism and Identities at the Edges of the Roman World” conference, held at the Petnica Science Center in 2012.
Memory studies — one of the most vibrant research fields of the present day — brings together such diverse disciplines as art and archaeology, history, religion, literature, sociology, media studies, and neuroscience. In scholarship on ancient Rome, studies of social and cultural memory complement traditional approaches, opening up new horizons as we contemplate the ancient world. The fifteen essays presented here explore memory in the Roman Empire, addressing a wide spectrum of cultural phenomena from a range of approaches. Ancient Rome was a memory culture par excellence and memory pervades all aspects of Roman culture, from literature and art to religion and politics. This volume is the first to address the cultural artifacts of Rome through the lens of memory studies. An essential guide to the material culture of Rome, this book brings important new concepts to the fore for both scholars of the ancient world and those of social and cultural memory throughout human history.
This volume introduces the Cross-Cultural Interaction Model (CCIM), a visual tool for studying the exchanges that take place between different cultures in borderland areas or across long distances. The model helps researchers untangle complex webs of connections among people, landscapes, and artifacts, and can be used to support multiple theoretical viewpoints. Through case studies, contributors apply the CCIM to various regions and time periods, including Roman Europe, the Greek province of Thessaly in the Late Bronze Age, the ancient Egyptian-Nubian frontier, colonial Greenland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Mississippian realm of Cahokia, ancient Costa Rica and Panama, an...